The Enchanted Penny
YOUTH is our enchanted penny, that we spend for a cake of long life.
You had n’t the courage to trade it for anything you really wanted.
You have been so busy leading a successful life, that you have forgotten to notice that your successful life has been led.
Is n’t it true? Your hair is thin, and you move like a forty-two centimetre gun, but you remarked fatuously the other day, ‘ I ’m just as young as I ever was.’
Oh no, you’re not! If young people were n’t too polite, they’d soon undeceive you. Remember the yawning débutante next you last evening. She said that what ailed her was too many dances. But it was you.
Youth was undoubtedly the nicest thing you ever had, but you have n’t it any longer. You are outside.
Poor, middle-aged Shakespeare deluded himself like you.
So long as youth and thou are of one date.
He had only genius, while his sweetheart had youth; and having it, justly flouted him, as youth is flouting you every day. Youth is through with you. There you are, buried forever under wrinkles and sedateness. Youth does n’t know you any more. You appeal to it for recognition, and it laughs at you.
You still young? You? No indeed! Look at real youth pursuing its fantastic preferences; at Reginald Warneford, engaging a Zeppelin single-handed, in regions near the sun; at Otto von Weddigen leaving his bride, to carry on a desperate warfare under seas.
Do you honestly sympathize with them? It is n’t enough to say you disapprove of war. War exists.
No, you grant a kind of nobility in the young simpletons. But your real sympathies lie with Luigi Cornaro, and the survivors of the G.A.R.
You even waste some perfunctory enthusiasm on Methusaleh, who never did anything but grow old. You feel the intense respectability of age. You admire its dignity. Only the old ever do that. Patriotism, ambition, and adventure seem to you dubious interests that have a lamentable effect on the actuaries’ tables.
It is the annoying penalty of that false gift of the gods, long life. You protest. Must you then, who fancied you held youth in fee simple, take your place with the toothless and the ankylosed? You are convinced that with you age is only a mask. Behind it dwells imperishable adolescence.
That’s what your grandmother, aged eighty-seven, thought, too.
You have spent your penny for this rather stale and tasteless cake. Sometimes, when you think of the price, it chokes you.